


Frail as Flowers

by deliciousshame



Series: AoKuro Week 2017 [1]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe, AoKuro Week, AoKuro Week 2017, Immortality, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 11:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10830819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliciousshame/pseuds/deliciousshame
Summary: He never thought he would be stupid enough to find himself indebted to a human.He's even more surprised by the fact that he now fears the day they will have to part.





	Frail as Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> For the first day of AoKuro Week 2017, prompt: immortality.

The fox can’t believe this is how his life will end. Stuck in a hunter’s trap like a kit having escaped the gaze of its mother. Inari-sama is probably laughing at him right now.

He tries to make peace with it. His next life might be better than this one.

Still, he was so close to getting his second tail. That would have been nice. 

Not that it matters anymore. He’s going to die here, his white pelt invisible in the winter snow. He’s getting sleepy, lulled by the cold. He knows that if he closes his eyes, it’s the end for him, but he can’t see another alternative.

He whines. He can’t help it.

“Poor thing.”

Great. A human gets to witness his death. 

The human approaches, and the fox can’t help but show his teeth, but the human ignores him and puts his huge hand on his head. He can’t help but lean into the warmth. At least he won’t be alone in his last moments. 

Except what he feels isn’t the embrace of death, but the sudden release of his trapped paw. He turns to look at the human, stunned, but he’s too busy with… bandaging his wounded paw? to notice him staring. 

“Here, all done. Be more careful next time or I’ll be the one to eat you!” But the human softens his words with another gentle pat and an onigiri that reminds how long ago his last meal was. 

The human leaves.

This cannot be the end of it. 

_________________________

The man lives by himself in a little hut far from the village. He’s poor and without family, surviving mostly from what he could farm from his little field.

The fox can’t let this stand. He owes this man his life. He must pay his due.

His kind has a way for that. 

A few moments later, and he’s transformed into a woman humans would call beautiful, short but slim and with skin as fair as his pelt is white. He will contrast against the man’s long frame and darker skin, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

He walks to the door and calls out, telling the man who saved him that he, she, is a traveller looking for somewhere to spend the night in this harsh winter. 

Of course the man lets him in. A kind man such as him would not leave a desperate woman alone in the cold.

The fox turned woman does not leave the next day, nor the one after. He stays and helps the man, cooks his food and keeps his house clean and secretly asks Inari-sama to make the man’s field fertile and send him good fortune. 

He settles into this life easily, happy to stay by the man’s side, enjoying his constant presence. It’s nothing like his life as a fox, but it has its own perks. 

He learns the man’s name, and happily takes it when they get married, the man only too grateful for his continued company to refuse his offer. 

It takes him a few years to realise that what he thought was appreciation for his savior turned into love. At some point, he stopped minding all the tasks that used to be necessary to keep up his disguise. He just started appreciating how seeing him made the man smile. The idea of the truth being discovered now scares him to death. He doesn’t want to have to leave everything they built behind, like he’ll have to if his husband finds out he married a fox. 

So he does everything in his capacity to keep up the charade perfectly. The man stays completely oblivious.

Their daughters inherit some of his strange abilities, but they are all humans. None of them are foxes. They grow older before his eyes, the way he doesn’t, not really, not behind the façade he uses to live with his beloved husband and their dear children. It’s a sweet spectacle as first, seeing his babies grow into children and then into adulthood in what seemed to him like a blink of an eye. Sadly, time does not only pass for them. His husband, too, grows older and older. It’s the humans’ lot. There is nothing he can do about it. He can only watch, impuissant, as his limber husband grows stiff, as his skin starts sagging and his back, hurting.

He never stops smiling, though.

He stays until the very end, until all their daughters have been married off and have moved on, leaving them alone in their little hut. He just wakes up one morning and he knows it will be the day his husband will depart. He knew this would happen eventually. His husband has been sick for a while. He tries not to cry as he holds his hand and witnesses his husband’s last smile. 

The fox turns into a fox for the first time in years and leaves his human life behind without a second look. What had been tying him to the place isn’t here anymore. 

He has two tails now.

_________________________

Time still moves on. The little village where they used to live disappear, abandoned. It doesn’t matter. Other villages replace it as the humans’ leaders change. Their lifestyle, too, change. People come from the West and bring with them new ideas, new technologies, new cultures. They desert the forest for what they call cities. The clothes change. They forget about creatures like him completely. Where humans used to worry about being tricked by them, now they ridicule those that still believe in them. 

The fox knows all of this because he couldn’t stay away. While life in the forest in unchanging, all this evolution is a lot more interesting. He’s too curious to stay away, and having spent one human lifespan undetected, he was pretty confident he could fit in without too much trouble. So he took one human life after the other, taking the place of stillborn babies or young dead children like a western changeling. The parents are saved from the pain of loss, and he seamlessly gets another human life. 

Maybe that’s why he managed to live up to this point. He has eight tails now. It’s a very rare feat for his much reduced kind. They struggled to adapt, while he joined the humans and lived through the changes. 

He got married again. He had other children. He still keeps an eye on his descendants through the ages. He was fond of many of them, but none of them replaced that first, long-lost lover.

_________________________

He was curled in the forest, sleeping in a burrow beneath the roots of a maple tree, but when he wakes up he’s filled with a sense of purpose, the remnants of a fading dream only telling him he needs to go to Edo, no, the humans call it Tokyo now. He’s old enough to recognise Inari-sama’s guiding hand, and so doesn’t fight the impulse.

It’s by following this impulse that he ends up taking his latest human disguise, a human male named Kuroko Tetsuya. 

_________________________

He has a lot of knowledge and skills, gathered over the course of centuries. When his current form and personality guide him toward something new, he always loves to try it out.

And yet, for all his natural talents and unfathomable experience, he cannot master basketball.

Oh, he tries and tries, but it somehow always stays out of his reach. He, who was once famed as a redoubtable kemari player, cannot seem to make this ball do what he wants it to do. 

Still, he cannot give up. He won’t lose to a stupid human sport.

_________________________

He didn’t spend a lot of time wondering why Inari-sama sent him here. He cannot possibly fathom her reasons. 

But when Aomine-kun first smiles at him in the third gymnasium, it all becomes clear. Saṃsāra. Nothing is ever really over. 

He has another chance. 

_________________________

How can human worries seem both so trivial and so overwhelming? He knows that the passage of time will mend Aomine-kun’s wounds, but that knowledge isn’t helping either of them right now.

In the end, all his years can’t stop them from going their different ways. 

But it’s not over. It can’t be. He will do everything in his power to build back the bridges between them. 

_________________________

After all that happened, he can’t say he’s unhappy with their newly mended relationship, but he’s not satisfied. He made strong friendships with a lot of humans. He knows a relationship doesn’t have to be romantic for it to be meaningful. But that doesn’t soothe the part of him that remembers when they were married. He wants that again, even if it’s only for a few shorts years. If he had known, he might have picked a female form. Maybe it would have made it all easier. 

He keeps struggling with this dilemma up to their third year of high school, too afraid to scare him off to try and seduce him but unable to turn away, when Aomine-kun himself calls him for a meeting at Maji Burger. He accepts, like he always does, and he can tell there is something wrong from the moment he sits in front of Aomine-kun and sees him fidgeting slightly in his seat. Butterflies multiply in his stomach. Curse Aomine-kun and his ability to turn him into a kit again. 

After a few mouthfuls, Aomine-kun finally spits out what has been bothering him. 

How stupid of him to think he was the only one conscious of the red thread that bonds them together. He’s not the only one who can feel the hands of fate. 

He almost cuts off Aomine-kun in his haste to say yes. Aomine-kun looks surprised, but when he realises what just happened he smiles this smile the fox loves more than anything else. He can feel his worries fly away, leaving the path to their future wide open.

_________________________

Every time they come back to Japan to visit their friends and family, Tetsuya visits the Namiyoke Inari Shrine and leaves an offering to Inari-sama. He thanks her for the long years she gave him, for her constant guidance, for Aomine-kun’s continued health and prosperity. 

He will soon grow his ninth tail, thus allowing him to ascend to the heavens by Inari-sama’s side if he wishes. He doesn’t know how this will change him. Maybe it will sever all his connections to the mortal world and the humans inhabiting it. At this point in time, he cannot imagine it. If Aomine-kun came back to this plane once, he can do it again. The fox wants to welcome him back every single time. 

Maybe he should try to guide him toward enlightenment. Free him completely from the endless circle of life and death, have him ascend to another world where they could stay together until the end of time. 

He snorts. Even he doesn’t think he could manage this feat. Maybe during his next incarnation. He just wants them to enjoy this one. 

“So this is where you disappear each time? Ten years together and I had no idea you were a believer. I guess you’ll always surprise me.”

He jumps. How could Aomine-kun possibly have followed him all the way to the shrine without him noticing? That’s impossible. “Aomine-kun.”

Aomine-kun looks around. “So, Inari? Why her especially?”

“I’ve always worshipped Inari-sama.”

“So it’s a family thing. Okay. I’ll get an offering too.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s important to you, right? Then, it’s important to me too. Just show me how to do it so I don’t shame you in front of your goddess.”

So he does. He helps him pick a decent offering and shows him the ritual as practiced in this shrine. Aomine-kun takes it more seriously than he ever thought he would. 

He cannot help but think that this is but one more of Inari-sama’s machinations, but to what end?

A member of his species runs along a building. Aomine-kun would not be able to notice the other four tails the fox drags behind him. 

“Huh. A white fox. That’s rare. I feel like I’ve seen one, a long, long time ago.”

He blinks. “They are rare. Where would you have seen it?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense. I vaguely remember snow, cold, and a pair of pale blue eyes staring at me. It’s not like it’s the kind of scenery you find around Tokyo. Maybe when I visited my grandparents when I was younger? Maybe it was just a dream.”

He cannot possibly remember. That’s not how reincarnation works for the vast majority of the population. 

Still, Aomine-kun found his way here without him noticing. Maybe there is more than both their wills at work here. 

Is this an indication that he should tell him the truth? Is it the right thing to do? Would he even believe it?

He wouldn’t have a choice in the matter. He married someone who can shapeshift, twice. Proving this would be easy. 

Would he feel manipulated? Would he feel hurt, cheated, duped? 

Would he think he isn’t loved?

Even if he’s fine with it, he doesn’t want Aomine-kun to worry about himself dying and leaving him behind either. This is how it is. He has had ages to accept it. 

“What are you worrying about?”

“What?”

“Oh, come on, I can tell there’s something wrong. Spill.”

“…Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Where is that coming from? Okay, fine, we’re in a shrine. I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it.”

“What about fate?”

“The big questions are coming out today. Fate, sure. There are way too many strange things happening around us for it to be all down to luck.”

“Do you think we’re destined to be together?”

“Why do you even worry about that? It’s not like it’s what determines whether you’re happy with someone or not. But, to answer your question, I have no idea. No one knows that kind of stuff. Well, maybe the gods do.”

That’s all well and nice, but it’s not exactly helping him finding a satisfying answer to his dilemma. 

Aomine-kun’s hand finds his. He worries a few seconds that someone will see them, especially in a holy place, but the shrine is empty at this hour on a weekday. “Look, I don’t know what you’re keeping from me, or worrying about, or hesitating over.”

“I-“

“And I don’t care. I mean, if you want to tell me, I’ll happily listen, but if you don’t, that’s okay too. Unless you wanna leave me” a somewhat heavy pause “but I don’t think that’s it?”

He nods his refusal. 

“Okay, then forget about it. It’ll come out when it will come out.”

Aomine-kun has no idea what he’s talking about, but it’s still reassuring to hear him voice his support. He’s giving him the out he’s wondering he should take. 

He squeezes Aomine-kun’s hand and stays silent. For now.

_________________________

In the end, he decides not to tell him. As much as he believes in Aomine-kun, he doesn’t think he could handle seeing him worrying about the way the passage of time will tear them apart the way he himself does.

He thought he could handle it. He has known so many humans, has been with so many of them, and yet he can barely handle Aomine-kun talking about retiring from professional sports. It’s not the kind of job a human can do until they consider themselves old, but it’s such a reminder that this won’t last, this can’t last, that it stops him from sleeping most nights. He wonders why Inari-sama guided him to Aomine-kun only for him to go through this again. 

The next time they go back to Japan, he goes to the shrine, alone this time, and asks directly. He demands, pleads, laments, but gets no answer.

It’s feeling defeated that he returns to their room. If Aomine-kun notices, he doesn’t say anything.

When he wakes up the next morning, he’s filled with a sense of calm he hasn’t know in ages. He knows Inari-sama has spoken. He might not remember exactly what she says, but he doesn’t need to.

“Aren’t you feeling better this morning.”

“Hello, Aomine-kun.”

“And what got you so chipper this morning?”

“Well, I had a dream…”


End file.
